Clue in Review – Very addictive!!

To be clear: I haven’t played the board game before, so I am reviewing Clue® based purely on its presentation and gameplay on the iDevice. Well, I found out that Clue® is a murder mystery which I set out to solve!

Once loaded, Clue®’s main menu presents the game’s various settings, gives some background on the characters and statistics about the game. Given that I’m an adventurous man, I went directly to “Play!”. On my first go, the system automatically took me to an “Internship” or guided tour on the game. This is especially useful for the Clue®[less] uninitiated like myself and effectively guides the player who has never had the chance to play the board game. Once through the guided tour, I started my first “official” game.￼

Within the game-screens, there are various buttons on the top-left corner of the screen for interrogating other characters as well as a “flashlight” to examine objects in a particular room. When the button is pressed, the room goes dark and only examinable objects are displayed in colour. Some of these objects and all NPC characters will give clues to toward finding out the mystery. All of this summarised in the “Notes” panel. From there, the “Crime Map” and “Suspicions” panels can be used to deduce the answer: murderer, murder weapon and place of crime. Of course, everything is timed, and once submitted, an answer is given a ‘star’ evaluation based on time.￼

Given that I had not played the board game, nor have I played any other related games, I was slow to pick up the tricks required to successfully finish each level (I won’t divulge them here; they are for you to discover!), so I was actually quite frustrated. However, once I got the hang of the game and its features, I was hooked!! Each level has multiple endings, so this makes the game a real bargain and subsequent levels rising in complexity, Clue becomes more and more fun.

As for my comments on the build and finish of the game – Clue® has the typical EA quality of finish. The game is treated to great background music that enhances the gameplay, and the graphics are in-line with the theme of the game (although they aren’t complex like SimCity or NFS). Clue® also has auto-save, which is great because a game might take a while given that there are many clues to analyse. Having to answer phone calls does not mean that a game has to be restarted.

However, I do have concerns about the speed of the game; perhaps it’s because the game has quite a few big algorithms to work on in the background, but I just feel that the loading speed is quite slow (I used an iPhone 3G). Otherwise, I really think that this game is great and I can recommend it to anyone!!